Could happiness be a purchasable commodity like any other? It has long been a cliché that we cannot simply buy happiness, but is this really true? In fact, several recent studies have begun to find striking correlations between wealth and happiness, but it isn’t that simple. For example, your purchased happiness seems to depend on…
Read MorePrenatal Facial Recognition
We already know that faces are incredibly central to human interaction, but facial recognition may also be fundamental to our brain’s development. Science has long demonstrated that even newborn infants have a strong preference for human faces over other stimuli. Now, a new study from the University of California, Los Angeles, may have found that…
Read MoreAnxiety and Ambiguity
Why does that person look so angry? You don’t have to have any sort of chronic anxiety to understand how easy it is to misunderstand other people’s facial expressions. We often interact with strangers, or even friends, and find ourselves unable to read their emotions, fearing that they are unhappy or angry. In fact, newly…
Read MoreEmotion in an Artificial Intelligence World
It is an almost omnipresent fear these days that technology is degrading human connections, but could we leverage that same technology to foster closer emotional ties? We already have enough trouble reading each other’s emotions, and this becomes even harder when we communicate over long-distances, whether through email, phone calls, or even video chat. We…
Read More